Organization is Key- Family History Scrapbooking Sunday

A little over a week ago I discovered the blog, The Scrappy Genealogist, and saw that she was looking for others to join her in an online digital scrapbooking class.  I was intrigued since I’ve not tried doing my scrapbooking on line and thought it might be a fun thing to try out.  I signed up for “Family History Class 1” taught on the Jessica Sprague website and after some initial hiccups was all ready to start with the class.  The class required that you use Adobe Photoshop, but my older version did not seem to want to work with the templates provided in the class.  At first I thought I’d have to buy some new software, but then I found that Adobe offers free 30-day trials of their products.  Yay!

I read through the first few days class instructions and then jumped right in to working on the title page for my scrapbook.  I waffled for a little while on which side of my family to focus on, but ultimately decided that my mom’s parents (Morse and Krueger) would be easier since I actually have a lot of information on them and tons of photos.  Here’s my title page so far:

I then started working on the timelines for use in the scrapbook.  Here’s where I became a bit overwhelmed and lost some momentum.  It was difficult to decide what facts I should include in the timeline and which to exclude.  Do I include the birth of each child? Do I include their marriage information and their children’s births?  As I began to stew on all of this I decided perhaps I needed to take a break. 

So I turned to the instructional video for Elements Organizer on the class website.  I really should have watched these first.  The video showed great information on using Elements to organize the pictures and documents by family and person.  I could definitely see the benefit of incorporating this program into my daily use to organize my files in a more visual way.  I could then click on a tag like “Shirley Krueger” and all the photos and documents associated with her would fill the screen.  Pretty cool!  Needless to say, I have grand plans to put this program to work and will probably purchase this program when my 30-day trial expires.  Though I have used Google’s Picasa in the past for organizing my photos, I’ve found it not as user friendly as the Elements organizer.  I guess you get what you pay for since Picasa is a free program.

In the next week I will continue to work on getting myself organized and work on my timelines.  Hopefully I can get a lot done early in the week so that I can move on to the next few lessons and keep up with my classmates:

Jackie Baker of Jackie's Genealogical Journey, Jennifer Shoer of The Scrappy Genealogist, Stephanie of Corn and Cotton: My Family's Story, Valerie Elkins of Family Cherished, and Jenna of Desperately Seeking Surnames

Interesting Possibility on Alford Side of Family Tree

This morning I was poking around a bit on the family tree and exploring my great-great-great-grandparents on the Alford side.  Well, it looks like my GGGGrandmother Nancy Cole Moytoy was the daughter of Cherokee Indians.  I'd always heard hints of this in family stories, but I'd always thought it was a stretch.  Now I'm thinking that it would be interesting to get my dad to do a DNA test to see if we really are descendants of Native Americans.  


Which brings me to the topic of DNA testing.  I've been listening to podcasts by Lisa Louise Cooke who does Genealogy Gems and has a packed website at http://www.genealogygemspodcast.com/ that has all kinds of cool tidbits.  Well on Episode 29 she interviews a representative of the  Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation which back in 2007 was offering free DNA testing.  Too bad I wasn't interested in that back then!  Anyway, they are basically trying to prove that ultimately we are all related (at a guess, some kind of Adam & Eve type deal) with the hopes that once we all realize this we'll all be a little more peaceful and understanding.  I like the overall idea of it despite the possible religious connotations.  


So far, I've learned that getting your oldest male relative on that particular family line is your best bet for finding matches.  They basically take a cheek swab (or a swish of mouthwash) worth of DNA to get the Y-chromosomes which can be traced back in the paternal line of your family.  There are a large number of companies that now offer this service with varying levels of detail and many claim to have great databases to match your data.  I did a simple Google search for "largest DNA database in the world" and came up with Family Search which is associated with the Mormon Church.  I've been stumped on the Krueger line of the family for a while, so I checked their database to see how many datasets they have in that line.  They had 43 which was the largest group I've found of the sites I have checked so far.  Plus, they offer a discount for those joining their "project".  It's quite a pricey deal all the same.  The most basic test is $99 and the most expensive is $518 which gets you the anthropological history of your line as well.  I'm pretty sure that we're European in our line, so that seems a bit ridiculous to me.  The middle of the road test is $149 and looks to contain most of what I am interested in learning.


I still have a bit of a learning curve on all of this, but I think that I may be getting more serious about getting the DNA testing done as I hit more and more brick walls in my research.  I've been fortunate that so many of my relatives have shared their memories, family names, birth dates, death dates, and so on that my tree keeps expanding.  I love playing amateur detective and expanding my knowledge of the family history!